For another 2023 highlight, there was the "metaverse". A "platform" which next to no one uses.
For whatever reason, government officials have some wild fantasy of censoring and controlling things, so they started imagining it up as some bigger than life thing. We saw it mentioned at CoE. We saw it mentioned at World Government Summit 2023, where it was described as some world shaking technology which will revolutionize countless fields. We also saw a would-be censor in a country I won't mention for now chasing it, along with a bunch of other highly speculative technologies, such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). What's up with that?
If you have any inkling about UX though, it's not hard to understand why it won't takeover the world...
Now, it is hard to say it is absolutely useless, there are a few novel games which use VR headsets, perhaps, that'll go somewhere, although it also may not. However, this dream of having everyone run conferences or their lives out of the #metaverse is assuredly nonsense. The worst one being Facebook's metaverse which removes many of the positive benefits which someone might actually get out of the technology. Hell, it took an eternity for people to even get a bottom half to their bodies, and as is often the case, Mark Zuckerberg was ridiculed for being scared of sex.
We also saw concerns about privacy being voiced, likely largely stemming from Facebook's long history of... Not really being kind when it comes to privacy. Right now, the subject appears to have gone quiet for quite a number of months, which I suppose is probably a good thing. I also went into how bad faith actors were trying to conflate fictional content with reality*.
